Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems is a poem collection by Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1819. The collection also contains the poems "Lines written on the Euganean Hills", "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", and "Sonnet. Ozymandias". The collection was published by C. and J. Ollier in London. [1]
The poem was begun at Marlowe in the summer of 1817. Shelley sent a copy to the publisher in March, 1818, before leaving England. It was completed in August, 1818 at the Baths of Lucca in Italy and published in the spring of 1819.
The themes in the poem, such as marriage, political and religious reform, and incest, demonstrate similarities to Laon and Cythna or The Revolt of Islam , which Shelley was working on at the same time. [2] The incest theme is also present in the 1818 edition of Frankenstein , but removed in the 1831 edition, which Shelley contributed to in 1816–1817. [3] Victor Frankenstein marries his cousin Elizabeth. Shelley would return to the controversial incest theme in the 1819 play The Cenci .
Shelley uses the motif of "worms" as a poetic symbol or evocation of death in the work: "When he was in the church-yard lying/Among the worms. ... And the crawling worms were cradling her. ... [T]he dead ... Among their crawling worms."
Mary Shelley described the genesis of the poem and Shelley's theme of "Love" as "the law of life" and "the essence of our being": "Rosalind and Helen was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside, till I found it; and, at my request, it was completed. Shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind, and develop some high or abstruse truth. When he does touch on human life and the human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more subtle, or more pathetic. He never mentioned Love, but he shed a grace, borrowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed on that passion. When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against, we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts, and his delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest chords in our nature. Rosalind and Helen was finished during the summer of 1818, while we were at the Baths of Lucca." [4]
Rosalind and Helen are two exile English women who meet at the shore of Lake Como in northern Italy. Helen is accompanied by her son Henry. They sit on "a stone seat beside a spring" in a wooded and secluded mountainous region to relate their experiences. First, a "speaker" relates a local legend about that spot: "This silent spot tradition old/Had peopled with the spectral dead." A "hellish" shape appears regularly at midnight who leads the ghost of a youth and sits beside him there. A naked child wanders by when "the fiend" turns into "a lady fair". This is due to "a monstrous curse" because of incest between a brother and a sister that was "solemnized" at that spot. The sister and her child were murdered there by a mob. The brother was burned alive in the market-place. This tale of intolerance foreshadows the stories that Rosalind and Helen relate. [5]
Rosalind relates her story. She was living with her mother. Her father was absent. She established a relationship with a man whom she planned to marry. As they prepared to wed at the altar, her father appeared and informed them that the bridegroom was his son by another woman. He forbids the marriage. The bridegroom dies from the shock of the revelation. They would be committing incest. When the father dies, he leaves Rosalind and her mother with nothing. She is forced to marry a man she does not love in order to provide for herself and her mother. She has three children, all of whom loathe their father. The father dies. In his will, he stipulates that his wife shall not receive anything and that the children will be provided for as long as their mother separates from them. Rosalind decides to accept the terms rather than subject her children to poverty and want. She can no longer see her children.
Shelley seeks to show the role or plight of women under the traditional and conventional laws and customs of marriage. [6] Rosalind is a pliant victim. She stoically follows those customs.
By contrast, Helen loves "not wisely but too well", rejecting the societal norms and traditions of marriage. She is in love with the upper-class Lionel, who is amiable and outgoing but who espouses radical and revolutionary ideas which seek to reform and change the system under which he lives. He is a thinly disguised characterization of Shelley himself. Rosalind looked askance at their relationship at that time and broke off her friendship with Helen.
Lionel attacks the social, political, and religious status quo of society. He makes speeches and issues pamphlets. Frustrated in reforming society imbued with "tyranny" and "superstition", he becomes an exile and wanderer, an outcast from society. He returns after three years and renews his relationship with Helen. His spirit is revived with new hope and vigor to renew the battle against the powers that be but his health begins to decline. Their relationship is unconventional and unorthodox.
Lionel is subsequently arrested on charges of blasphemy and seditious libel for his alleged attacks against religion and the government. He is sent to prison.
He is released "soon, but too late" from imprisonment. [7] He takes a carriage from London to his residence in Wales. He is near death. He dies soon after.
Helen is traumatized by his death. She is cared for by Lionel's mother. During this time, Helen gives birth to a son. Lionel's mother dies during this period. Helen recovers. She discovers that Lionel had left her large sums of money and assets in his will. The "ready lies of law", however, prevent her from securing it. She brings legal action to obtain it.
Helen lives in a house with her son on the banks of Lake Como. Helen and Rosalind subsequently both live at this house.
Rosalind is reunited with her daughter. Her daughter and Helen's son live together and eventually establish a relationship and plan to wed. It is unclear, however, if they follow the traditional marriage vows as Rosalind did or whether they reject them as Lionel and Helen did.
Rosalind dies at an early age. Helen outlives her.
The final epithet posits an ambiguous and conjunctive posthumous transcendence: "And know, that if love die not in the dead/As in the living, none of mortal kind/Are blessed, as now Helen and Rosalind." [8]
John William Polidori was a British writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori.
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by the rise of a bubonic plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.
Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known, was the stepsister of the writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra. She is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"Love's Philosophy" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1819.
Mathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820 and first published posthumously in 1959. It deals with common Romantic themes of incest and suicide. The narrative deals with a father's incestuous love for his daughter.
The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem in twelve cantos composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817. The poem was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century by Charles and James Ollier in December 1817. Shelley composed the work in the vicinity of Bisham Woods, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, from April to September. The plot centres on two characters named Laon and Cythna, inhabitants of Argolis under Ottoman rule who initiate a revolution against its despotic ruler. Despite its title, the poem is not focused on Islam as a specific religion, though the general subject of religion is addressed, and the work draws on Orientalist archetypes and themes. The work is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Zastrozzi: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1810 in London by George Wilkie and John Robinson anonymously, with only the initials of the author's name, as "by P.B.S.". The first of Shelley's two early Gothic novellas, the other being St. Irvyne, outlines his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi and touches upon his earliest thoughts on irresponsible self-indulgence and violent revenge. An 1810 reviewer wrote that the main character "Zastrozzi is one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain".
Proserpine is a verse drama written for children by the English Romantic writers Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary wrote the blank verse drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems. Composed in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, it is often considered a partner to the Shelleys' play Midas. Proserpine was first published in the London periodical The Winter's Wreath in 1832. Whether the drama was ever intended to be staged is a point of debate among scholars.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Henry Buxton Forman was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire was a poetry collection written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth which was printed by Charles and William Phillips in Worthing and published by John Joseph Stockdale in September 1810. The work was Shelley's first published volume of poetry. Shelley wrote the poems in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth. The poems were written before Shelley entered the University of Oxford.
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson was a collection of poetry published in November, 1810 by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg while they were students at Oxford University. The pamphlet was subtitled: "Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786. Edited by John Fitzvictor." The pamphlet was published by John Munday and Henry Slatter in Oxford and consisted of fictional fragments that were in the nature of a hoax and prank or burlesque.
"The Cloud" is a major 1820 poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. "The Cloud" was written during late 1819 or early 1820, and submitted for publication on 12 July 1820. The work was published in the 1820 collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts, With Other Poems by Charles and James Ollier in London in August 1820. The work was proof-read by John Gisborne. There were multiple drafts of the poem. The poem consists of six stanzas in anapestic or antidactylus meter, a foot with two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable.
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, which defends the unorthodox hypothesis that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The book also argues that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love."
Since the initial publication of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, there has existed uncertainty about the extent to which Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, contributed to the text. While the novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary, Percy is known to have provided input in editing and publishing the manuscript. Some critics have alleged that Percy had a greater role—even the majority role—in the creation of the novel, though mainstream scholars have generally dismissed these claims as exaggerated or unsubstantiated. Based on a transcription of the original manuscript, it is currently believed that Percy contributed between 4,000 and 5,000 words to the 72,000 word novel.
"On Frankenstein" is a review of the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817 but not published until 1832.
